80738163270632 is the blog of Hernán Morales Durand

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lunes, 27 de octubre de 2014

Introduction : GraphViz in Pharo

GraphViz is a popular free graph visualization library currently used in many applications. In GraphViz you describe a graph in text format and the software draws a pretty picture of the graph.

A GraphViz package for Smalltalk was originally available in Squeak, but it was outdated in the current Pharo releases (3.0). The package facilitates the creation of graph descriptions in the DOT language of the Graphviz graphing tool. You write the graph using the beautiful Smalltalk syntax, and the GraphViz class generates the output in all available formats (dot,svg,png,jpg,gd,etc).

Now I have uploaded a new Metacello Configuration for GraphViz in Pharo 3.0, available in the Configuration Browser. To use it, GraphViz should be installed and present in the PATH environment variable. More useful information can be found in the original repository (Connectors compatibility is still missing until we get a Connectors version which loads in Pharo 3 or 4).
The Configuration loads both stable versions of CommandShell and XML-Parser packages.

A Smalltalk Family Tree

I have collected the Smalltalk implementations I know and grouped them in a graph by what could be considered their "family". Some of them are not supported anymore, others are difficult to find or get executed again. Exotic or very old Smalltalks like Bricktalk, DuoTalk, Marvin, etc. were not included because there are too few references on the web. Now by looking at it in perspective, one could understand why Smalltalk is considered the most evolved and state-of-the-art programming environment. Here is the resulting graph :